


Gods and Cities

by Feneris



Category: Gravity Falls, Transcendence AU - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Transcendence, Cities, Gen, Gods, Mysteries, Spirits, kami - Freeform, religious experience
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-30
Updated: 2016-03-30
Packaged: 2018-05-30 04:02:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6407968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Feneris/pseuds/Feneris
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For David, the local gods had simply been a part of life growing up in northern BC. While their presence had never been important to him spiritually, their absence had still been jarring when he moved to Vancouver. Moving to Gravity Falls had offered the chance to reconnect with beings that had been an near constant presence growing up. He just needed to find them first. </p><p>For Sarah, she had spent her first sixteen years unaware of the spirit of her home city Nampa, Idaho. That had changed when she had experienced a powerful communion with the city spirit. An experience she had repeated when she moved to Vancouver, and again when her and David pulled into Gravity Falls for the first time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gods and Cities

**Author's Note:**

> First of all, many thanks to ThisCat for helping me to edit and shape this story. I really appreciate it. I ended up shaving off most of what I originally wrote and the story turned out the better for it.
> 
> Second, this is not funny like many of my other stories. This was more of a way to try and explore David and Sarah's spiritual beliefs and expand things like city spirits and "gods' that have been mentioned on the TAU blog but not really explored. Still, I hope people like this story

David had grown up surrounded by gods. Not God. His parents were not religious people, and his dad was in fact one of the most bitter atheists David had ever known. But the small BC town David had grown up in was home to hundreds of local deities/guardians/spirits/kami (whatever you wanted to call them.) There were hundreds of them, everywhere. Every creek and river, every valley, every stretch of forest, every mountaintop, sheer cliff-face, and waterfall all had a local god who watched over it. Even the local garbage dump, and several of the old pit mines had their own deities. 

Everyone in David’s hometown, regardless of their religious beliefs, regarded the local gods as simply a fact of life for their area. Much in the same way they regarded bears. Denying their existence wouldn’t make them go away, you had to deal with them regardless. 

For the bears, people made sure to pick their fruit trees promptly and dispose of their garbage. For the gods they made sure to leave appropriate offerings and not make them mad. It was just something you had to do.

One of the local machinery operators once abandoned a backhoe with a leaky gas tank in one of the creeks, and barely escaped being drowned by the local god. Everyone else regarded the incident as horrible, a close call, and kind of the guy’s own fault. The man was a local. He should have known what he was doing, and he shouldn’t have been surprised when he angered the god. Much in the same way everyone was shocked and appalled, yet not terribly surprised, when a tourist got mauled by a mother bear when she tried to get a selfie of her standing next to a bear cub. 

Offerings to the gods were considered an essential part of any hiking kit or survival pack. Kids learned proper protocols for dealing with local gods as part of their elementary school education. (Along with bear safety.) Hiking trails and campsites had shrines to show that the local gods approved of them. 

When David was twelve, changes to logging industry regulations angered a local god. Loggers, suddenly fearing for their safety in the woods, spearheaded a six-month forestry strike in protest. It shut down the forestry industry for half the country, and made international news. Needless to say, changes were made that were more to the local gods’ liking. 

It wasn’t a matter of spiritually or religion, it was simply a part of life. Part of the culture David had grown up with. 

When he went to Vancouver to attend university, one of the things he noticed keenly was the lack of gods. There were gods in Vancouver of course. Several of the local parks and conservation areas had their own deities, and so did the surrounding mountains and inlets. But those gods had either been suborned by the greater spirit of Vancouver or were remote and isolated beings that made themselves known only to those who were willing to stray off the marked paths. For most people, the local gods weren’t even a small part of their lives. In fact, most people were utterly unaware of their existence. 

The contrast to his hometown was jarring. It wasn’t the only contrast of course. Vancouver was David’s first experience living long-term in any large urban area. As the stereotypical country boy living in the big city, there was a lot of things David had to learn. How to use the transit system, where to buy groceries, what to do with your garbage when you didn’t simply burn it in the backyard, and so on. 

But those were all things David had expected. However, the lack of local gods had caught him completely off guard. Regardless of his opinions towards religion, they had nonetheless been a part of his world. Not in any deep spiritual sense per-se, but in the way you miss familiar foods when you are living in a foreign country. Even if the food in question is crappy hamburgers and macaroni and cheese in a box. 

Therefore, the first thing David did when he moved to Gravity Falls with Sarah, was to put on his hiking gear, and go off to find out who the local gods were. It was a lot harder than he expected. Gravity Falls had grown a lot since the Transcendence, but it was by no one’s standards a city. If his experiences growing up were any indication, he should have found a local god at the first creek he came across. 

Instead he had to hike ten miles out of town before he encountered his first local god. A spirit of a small bramble infested marsh which had been quite surprised to see him. Still it had accepted David’s offering, and had been willing to share greetings with him, so David considered the outing a success. The next weekend he headed out in the opposite direction. Again, he had to hike ten miles before he saw even a trace of a local god. East, west, north, south, it didn’t seem to matter. Ten miles was how far he needed to hike before the local gods began appearing. 

He even began plotting the locations and territories of the local gods on a map. Sure enough a pattern emerged. No local gods claimed territory within ten miles of Gravity Falls. It made a near perfect circle actually, and David was sure that the only reason it didn’t make an exact perfect circle had more to do with errors on his end. A ten-mile radius from the center of Gravity Falls that continued on irregardless of natural features or terrain. Which was actually the most bizarre part of it all. Local gods were intrinsically tied to their territory. The only boundaries or restrictions that meant anything to them were the ones imposed by nature. They didn’t just ignore a section of a river or valley because it crossed a political border or ran too close to a city. Not unless there was a good reason at least.

The way David figured it, the best and most direct way to answer the question was the ask the gods themselves. If that didn’t work, he could try other means. So, armed with a pouch of tobacco to use as an offering, he hiked out to meet with several of the friendlier gods and ask them who or what controlled various territories on his map. Especially the various features within the ten-mile radius around Gravity Falls.

To David’s surprise, not only did they actually answer him, they gave him the same answer every time.

“That’s Alcor’s territory,” was what all they said. 

\---

Cities had spirits. It was a common fact of life in the post-transcendence world. In most cases, the cities never manifested their powers overtly. They were simply there, the unseen, silent embodiment of the entire community. 

Most people spent their whole lives utterly unaware of their city’s spirit. This had partially to do with the fact that said people were as much a part of the spirit as they were independent individuals. But it also had a lot to do with the fact that cities rarely manifested as recognizable entities. 

There were exceptions of course. Portland had reputedly declared Hank Pines, Sarah’s distant great-great-great-and-so-on grandfather as its champion. Las Vegas had even managed to buy up the rights to its land in a complex gambling scheme. But most cities manifested their powers in subtler ways, influencing their internal workings in ways that even the most observant people failed to notice. Though there was one town in northern Wisconsin that was fond of communicating with people by rearranging the letters on signs.

Sarah had grown up in Nampa, Idaho. Like most people in the city, she had grown up largely unaware of the greater spirit embodying the community. She would have likely continued to remain completely oblivious. However, when she was sixteen, she found herself in a park near her house trying to sort out the emotional wreck that was her first breakup. 

Her first experiment in having a boyfriend had gone poorly. The breakup itself wasn’t particularly surprising. Her relationship with Mark had already been on fire when it crashed into the metaphorical ground. However, it has still left behind a twisted wreckage of conflicting feelings and smoldering insecurities. 

She had been sitting under a tree, her arms wrapped around her knees, trying to sort through her heavy thoughts, when she suddenly connected with the spirit of Nampa. The whole experience last only about three minutes. But in those three minutes, Sarah had experienced the city of Nampa in its entirely. Nampa was as much an amalgam of every single being that lived in it, as it was a singular entity. Every person who had ever lived there had left their mark in some way. Every building built, and every building torn down had helped shape it. Its history stood like some kind of ghostly backbone; no longer there, but still shaping the city. 

It put a lot of things into perspective, and made her realize just how small and petty Mark and all his bullshit actually was. It also gave her a new appreciation for the human ability to make things that were greater then themselves. 

She had a similar experience when she moved to Vancouver to attend university. She had been at a coffee shop near the university campus having tea with a friend from Idaho who was passing through. Suddenly she was communing with the spirit of Vancouver. According to her friend, she had completely zoned-out for nearly seven minutes.

Vancouver was not Nampa. It might not have been terribly older, but it was certainly bigger and a lot more powerful. Where Nampa only barely had a hundred thousand people, Vancouver was home to millions of beings. In those seven minutes, she had been completely aware of Vancouver. The millions of people that walked its streets, the ancient ethnic neighborhoods, the shadowy workings of its powerful vampire cabal; everything. The history seeped into Vancouver’s foundations, the everyday little actions of people, the greater forces at work around it which no one could control. She could see how it all shaped the city. She could also feel the spirit at work shaping the lives of the people living in it, just as its collective consciousness was shaped by those very same people. 

It opened her eyes to the power flowing just under her feet, and drove home how sometimes the small actions could be just as powerful as the big ones.

Her most powerful experience with a city, or any being for that matter, occurred when David and her were first pulling into the Gravity Falls with the moving truck containing their stuff. It was a good thing David was driving, because she had frozen up for over fifteen minutes. (David had been so focused on keeping the big truck between the road-lines that he hadn’t even noticed.) 

Gravity Falls was weird. Not as an impression or opinion, but rather intrinsically. Weird was simply what Gravity Falls was. A part of its being as important as any person, building or history. It wasn’t as big as Vancouver. It didn’t have the sheer population of the city. But it was still powerful. The town had been ground-zero for the transcendence. But it didn’t wear the marks like a scar, the same way Nampa or Vancouver did. It wore them kind of like a crazy tattoo it had always wanted to get. It was mystery, it was weirdness, it was the oddball of the family that never saw any reason it should be anything else. It was as much the woods around it as it was the town. It was as much about its secrets as it was about it’s open history. It...

It was then she saw her family tree, snaking its way through the town’s history. Names, faces, deeds, they all seemed to permeate the town. They seemed to twist into the Transcendence tattoos Gravity Falls wore so proudly, then radiate out into the world beyond. She could trace the strands all the way up to the present day. All the way to her. Then came the most intense feeling of belonging. That this was her place in the world, and she belonged in Gravity Falls. It was like a family greeting an estranged relation who they had always heard about, but had never met, and welcoming them in.

As the vision faded, she was filled with a warm feeling of comfort. It was like she was sliding into her place in the world. That she was on the right track, and everything was going to turn out all right. She hadn’t made a mistake coming here, she could make this town her home.


End file.
